Re: Priorities

[Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net>]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 12:06:58PM -0700, Joey Hess wrote:

> Yes, task-webserver-roxen should not exist. I have written about this
> before. "I want a web server" is a suitable task, "I want web server
> foo" is not.

I think the problem we're seeing is this:  the 'task-' package
namespace is magic.  But the task-* packages have been the main
example people see of empty, dependency-filled packages.  Which are
useful items in themselves.

We really need to distinguish these two things more clearly.  I
suggest that the 'task-*' namespace be controlled by either the policy
list (like menus and virtual packages), or by the boot list.  And I
suggest that we come up with some kind of minimal standards for empty
packages that are *not* intended for use by tasksel.  At the least,
suggest a new, separate naming convention for them.

Now, there are some related problems happening.  One big one is the
fact that "Recommends" and "Suggests" have lost their usefulness
since apt-get came on the scene.  I venture to suggest that several of
the inappropriate task-* packages exist purely to remedy this.  If,
e.g., the Roxen maintainer could add appropriate recommendations and
suggestions, and feel that people would actually see them, he might
not have been inspired to build a task-webserver-roxen package.

The ignoring of recommends/suggests is a problem in other places too,
for example, tasksel.  If a "task-desktop-gnome" package (which is one
that I think might make sense) could recommend packages like "gnome-
office-collection" and maybe suggest the "gnome-games-collection",
then we'd really have something.  But that won't work, so we have a
problem.

BTW, as an example of the scope of the problem, consider this:

  ~ $ grep-available -P roxen -sPackage|wc -l
       70

When you have 70 related packages to deal with, and you find that
recommends/suggests have become useless, it becomes pretty obvious why
you start looking for other options.

Anyway, while I think the recommends/suggests problem is something we
really need to address at some point, for the short term, I suggest we
formalize the concept of non-task empty-packages so that people won't
be enticed to abuse the magic task-* namespace.

cheers

-- 
Chris Waters   xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
      or    xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
                             | this .signature file.